


worlds enough and time

by mask_and_mirror



Category: Alien Series
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Murder, elizabeth/david if you squint, or really rather if i just continued this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 13:18:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17850179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mask_and_mirror/pseuds/mask_and_mirror
Summary: ... he could have taught that, to someone like her.David and Shaw's confrontations revisited.





	worlds enough and time

David doesn’t remember the last time he was surprised. The novelty of the sensation brings a secondary feeling of delight.

At the same time, he registers that Shaw is in shock. He recognizes her symptoms from when she woke from cryosleep: casting a look of betrayal, ready to fight any offers of assistance. The state of her is otherwise unreadable. Advanced diagnostics: he covers her trembling, nearly-naked form in his coat, puts his arms around her in a supportive grip, sits her down just before her legs give out from under her again. Away from the ammoniac smell of Weyland he can discern something different emanating from Shaw. The wound is obvious, but the smell… he recognizes the hydroxide odor of iodine and the tang of fear sweat, but there is something else and it’s splashed all over her…

She’s listening to Weyland, grasping for any outstretched hand of explanation for what’s happened to her in the last few hours. Weyland sees the need in her as clearly as David does (as he taught David to do), and he gives it, invoking the memory of her recently departed husband as a call-to-arms. And she accepts without pause. She nods and her breath slows. She gives up so quickly, so unlike her usual self…

…because she hasn’t. Pieces of a puzzle quite literally click into place for David, and he feels delight again at the soundless pop of his thought processes. He watches her settle so quickly because she made a decision before she stumbled into this room, and she feels triumphant in that decision. She killed her child— _his_ child—and she has just lit onto a path toward killing his father. And she hasn’t played into Weyland’s hands, but Weyland into hers. She watched her husband walk a straight path into the belly of the beast; now she’ll gladly watch Weyland do the same.

He would admire her ingenuity, if it didn’t interfere with his plans.

They leave her to stew for a night. David doesn’t waste a moment of it, either.

Weyland’s plan, as pure in its selfishness as it is, is locked tight and no longer relevant to David’s interests. He moves through the motions of caring for Weyland’s decaying body; he makes sure Vickers’ meeting with Weyland is uninterrupted; he watches the model of the alien ship in Janek’s control room. David spends all night running simulations of what might happen the next day; he delights in the fact that all of them end in error.

He doesn’t help prepare any of the suits except for Weyland’s. No one asked, and no one seems to notice how he jumps into his own, except for Shaw who watches his every move. She’s running simulations of a kind, and she doesn’t like where she sees David at the end of them. Shaw’s not on a suicide mission, and she’s not on a quest for vengeance; she’s not in this for Weyland, and after last night he doesn’t think she’s even in this for Holloway, either. He miscalculated when he first weighed her love for her husband over her passion for her life’s work. It fuels her past the impossible pain and devastation. It makes her dangerous to him. She’s grown too weak to hide it all behind her professional veneer of stoic scientist, and David is only too happy to observe and file away this new insight.

If she could only understand…

You can’t make something out of nothing. You must destroy before you can build. You must kill before you can bring life. He tried to show Weyland and the man never listened…

…if he’d had enough time, he could have taught that to someone like her. Someone who has killed not just to survive, but to win. She spent all night warring with herself, trying to stop herself from thinking about how her desire to find the Engineers led her husband to his death. She pushed all of that down, somewhere deep in that aching chasm of her abdomen, because none of that ended her, and she wasn’t done yet. She had to keep going. She had known death all her life, and she always kept going. She would let Weyland die and let the crew die and still she would find a way to keep going. All this death was in service to something greater, or else it was meaningless… David had explored the same tortuous revelations, but he had followed them down one path and was disappointed to recognize that Shaw had followed them down the other.

David smiles at her, to see it: the nearly-naked hunger for truth.


End file.
